


relevant, essential, and true

by astralArchetype



Category: Homestuck
Genre: i love rose and dave, rose centric alphaverse character study, this isnt ship you fucking freaks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 20:25:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19258582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralArchetype/pseuds/astralArchetype
Summary: It's not hard to know things, especially when you've been told more than you will ever need to know by forces far out of your control. What is much harder is understanding what to do with that knowledge when you know it's not meant for you. Or at least, not this version of you.Rose Lalonde is one of the most important characters in Homestuck canon, and she is well aware of that fact. But what about when all of a sudden, that Relevance is no longer True, and her existence does not appear to be Essential? Who do you become when you aren't quite you?Or, whatever happened to Alpha Rose Lalonde?





	relevant, essential, and true

You weren’t supposed to be the one to hear their whispers in your sleep. You knew that from a young age. You’re not sure exactly how old you were when you first heard their garbled moans, just that their presence at night is as sure a guarantee as the sun rising in the morning. Were you six when it first happened, waking up in the bottom bunk of a bed in a room filled with far too many kids your age, still too young to know that you were capable of hating that situation? Or maybe you were nine. Maybe they first visited you on one of those many nights you snuck out of the room to read and fell asleep on the floor somewhere, book and penlight still in hand. But whenever it was that first contact was made, it probably marked the beginning of when the other kids started to avoid you like the plague. Talking about the writhing, hideous monsters from your nightmares isn’t exactly the best way to make friends in a foster home. You had kept mostly to yourself even before then, choosing instead to escape into books as soon as you could read. But as soon as the others picked up on something even slightly different about you, you were dead to them. They called you a witch, so that was what you became.

You were particularly skilled at avoiding them when things got rough. At first, you just chalked it up to dumb luck. Later, you thought that you just had a strong enough understanding of the way every other child’s mind worked to know the path they’d take to torment you. The first guess was actually closer to the truth, but you wouldn’t realize this until much later. The safest spots illuminated in your mind were where you would mess with forces you didn’t yet understand, using pilfered herbs and candles burnt down to nubs. You didn’t seek out the gods yet-- you just wanted to better understand the deep dark pockets of the universe they inhabited. But you never got to spend much time hidden in these pockets before they were charged by another your age. 

They’d ask,”Gonna turn me into a frog?”

Or, “Who you gonna kill today?”

Or, best of all, “Trying to bring back your dead parents?”

Most of the kids in this particular foster home did have at least one living parent. They’d either run away, or they’d been abandoned with a note right after birth. And the kids who were missing both knew exactly how it had happened— they had some kind of closure early on. You had no such thing. For the longest time, you didn’t even have a birth certificate. You used to wonder all the time where your parents went— hoping against hope that a man or woman with blonde hair and violet eyes like yours would one day show up to take you home. But as the years went by, you realized that that wouldn’t feel like home at all. No matter how nice the place might be, no matter how much your parent figure might seem to love you, anyone who tried to get close to you would probably always feel like a stranger. Some days, you think it might work. But most days, you just feel doomed.

You go to a public middle school. Most of the kids you grew up around go to the same one, and word of your abnormality spreads like the hellfire they think you’ve been summoning. Most kids won’t come within a 10-foot radius of you. You’d like to think that it’s because they’re all terrified of your eldritch powers, but in all likelihood they probably just think you’re kind of weird. And if you’re being honest, none of those “spells” you cooked up when you were a little kid did much of anything besides making the attic smell permanently spicy. So you’ve more or less given up on the idea of having magic powers, and the roar of the gods from your dreams have faded to an occasional whisper. The other kids at your school, however, have not forgotten, and the ones who don’t give you an impossibly wide berth actively seek you out to start trouble. Once again, you find yourself avoiding most potentially unpleasant encounters with ease, but you still come home with more than your fair share of bruised lips and black eyes. This does not go unnoticed.

The first person to pull you aside is a music teacher you’ve never spoken to before, with questions on her lips and worry in her eyes. You’d seen her before— you had always been struck by her eccentricity of style, made clear in the long black skirts she wore to school and the inky tattoos that curled up her arms. But now, you wish she’d stop prying, always bugging and fussing and meddling in what she doesn’t need to know. You give her a different excuse every time-- you fell down the stairs. You got attacked by a dog. A ball hit you in the eye during gym class. She clearly can tell these excuses are nonsense, and eventually the conversation always moves on. She asks you about your favorite books, and you tell her about Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, excitedly recounting whatever haunting tale you read last. It becomes routine-- every day after school when she doesn’t have a class, you stop in and talk about books and art and music for an hour or so before you have to take the long walk back to whatever house you’re calling home for the time being. She never asks you about your home life, and you appreciate that. For once, you feel like someone gets you, like they understand what it feels like to be out of place in your own life. You even consider telling her about the creatures that have quietly slipped in and out of your dreams for the last several years, but you stop short. You don’t care if the other kids see you as a freak, but something about this feels sacred.

One day, several months into the sort of arrangement you have, the teacher asks if you’ve ever tried your hand at any musical instruments. Of course the answer is no, you were never even able to consider it given your precarious living situation. But she offers to teach you, there’s a beat-up spare violin in the back of the room and she thinks you could be really great if you gave it a try. At first, you refuse. Music was never in your plan for life, and you don’t think you would be very good anyway. But she insists, saying it would be good for you to “channel your creative energy into something”. You guess she’s right, and slowly your daily conversation times become interspersed with violin lessons. You are surprised to find yourself picking it up rather quickly, and even more surprised to find that you really like it. But most surprising of all is how the sound of your own playing drowns out the whispers in your head. What was once a dull roar, and then a faint murmur, becomes almost nothing. So you play, and you play, and you play, and the world comes back into focus, for just a little while.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first fic i've written since the rather extensive percy jackson self insert one i did in seventh grade lmao. this is just something i kinda wanted to do for fun, because i've always been fascinated by what the characters in hs become in alternate timelines, especially ones like rose who are So defined by their relationships to canon and the specific universe of the comic. also, as a dyke, rose is Incredibly important to me and who would i be if i didnt write an extensive examination of her character. thanks 4 reading luv u <<<3


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